A beautiful blue butterfly flutters towards a nest of warm dust and gas, above an intricate network of cool filaments in this image of the Vela C region by ESA’s Herschel space observatory.
Vela C is the most massive of the four parts of the Vela complex, a massive star nursery just 2300 light-years from the Sun. It is an ideal natural laboratory for us to study the birth of stars.
Herschel’s far-infrared detectors can spot regions where young high- and low-mass stars have heated dense clumps of gas and dust, where new generations of stars may be born.
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